[Marxism] Greg Palast on Deep Throat & "relative" degeneration of the press

[Brian Shannon <Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

DEEP THROAT COVER BLOWN - WASHINGTON POST STILL SUCKS
Wednesday, June 1, 2005
By Greg Palast

I've been gagging all morning on the Washington Post's
self-congratulatory preening about its glory days of the Watergate
investigation.

Think about it. It's been 33 years since cub reporters Woodward and
Bernstein pulled down the pants of the Nixon operation and exposed its
tie-in to the Watergate burglary. That marks a third of a century since
the Washington Post has broken a major investigative story. I got a
hint why there's been such a dry spell after I met Mark Hosenball,
investigative reporter for the Washington Post's magazine, Newsweek.

It was in the summer of 2001. A few months earlier, for the Guardian
papers of Britain, I'd discovered that Katherine Harris and Governor
Jeb Bush of Florida had removed tens of thousands of African-Americans
from voter registries before the 2000 election, thereby fixing the race
for George Bush. Hosenball said the Post-Newsweek team "looked into it
and couldn't find anything."

Nothing at all?   What I found noteworthy about the Post's
investigation was that "looking into it" involved their reporters
chatting with Florida officials -- but not bothering to look at the
voter purge list itself.

Yes, I admit the Washington Post ran my story -- seven months after the
election -- but with the key info siphoned out, such as the Bush crew's
destruction of evidence and the salient fact that almost all those
purged were Democrats. In other words, the story was drained of
anything which might discomfit the new residents of 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue.

Let's not pick on the Post alone. Viacom Corporation's CBS News also
spiked the story. Why? "We called Jeb Bush's office," a CBS producer
told me, and Jeb's office denied Jeb did wrong. End of story.
. . .
But before we get too weepy about the glory days of investigative
journalism gone by, we should remember that the golden era was not pure
gold.

Newspapers are part of the power elite and have never in US history
gone out of their way to rock the clubhouse. Let's go back to Hersh's
stellar story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

MORE AT
www.gregpalast.com


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